The health secretary for England, Jeremy Hunt, has been criticised recently over his handling of statistics. Although it can be easy to make statistical errors, his handling of the so called “weekend effect” and new contract for junior doctors has seen some particularly egregious examples.

Weekend mortality—In October Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of The BMJ, wrote to Hunt to pull him up on his conflation of the concepts of correlation and causation and to try to persuade him to stop making this error.1 A study in The BMJ (doi:10.1136/bmj.h4596) had shown a correlation between admission to hospital at weekends and death rates. It found that 11 000 more …